Postmodernism
From Information Habitat
Contents |
Contexts
The term "postmodernism" was first used in the 1870s in various contexts, but some scholars point to its formal emergence in J.M.Thompson's 1914 article in the philosophical review The Hibbert Journal. Here, Thompson used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."
Postmodernism means different things to cultural phenomena and also to different academic/professional fields and disciplines. Its difference from modernism, again, is contextual because the meaning of modernism, like postmodernism, depends on the particular cultural phenomenon being examined. For example, modernist literature is generally marked by the efforts to preserve individuality and meaning. in the face of rapidly changing social, cultural, and economic forces. Postmodernist literature often takes the attitude that the search for a stable meaning is futile.
Some social/cultural/historical forces affecting/affected by postmodernism include WWII, the Holocaust, and the development and deployment of the atomic bomb; The Cold War; massive commercial consumption; proliferation of mass media (TV, cinema, popular music, pulp novels, comic books/graphic novels, magazines, etc.; civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ activism, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, the emergence and proliferation of digital technologies and hypertex, and globalization and "the rise of the rest" of the world (beyond the UK, western Europe, and the United States).
Prevailing Theorists
Ancestors
While postmodernism is generally considered to have emerged in the 20th century, as an intellectual tradition it has roots in the work of a number of pre-20th century thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche's contributions to existentialist philosophy informed postmodernist thought on the search for meaning, and Sigmund Freud's contributions to psychoanalysis influenced postmodern thinking about the psyche, identity, and gender. Karl Marx eventually became one of the most substantial contributers to postmodernism, as capitalism and so-called mass culture proliferated freely. A great many other scholars could be considered "ancestors" to postmodernism but it is impossible to document all of them in this entry.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
Lyotard's career is unique in that he is most well known for articulating the postmodern and for writing about the postmodern as it relates to the human condition. Two important theories that distinguish Lyotard's work are the language game and the so-calledend of grand or master narratives. For Lyotard, language game, a term borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein, refers to the multiplicity of communities of meaning, the countless separate systems in which meanings are produced, and rules for their circulation are created. No one meaning is universal, nor is one set of rules. With Lyotard's theory of narratives, one prevailing interpretation is that “the end” refers to the exposure as narratives of culturally- and intellectually-dominating Western narratives/stories told through time about the nature of being, of religion, of language, of art, of science, etc. “Master narratives” are considered “mastering” because they self-legitimatize, and their rhetorical power obscures the visibility of competing narratives, thus ensuring the apparent singularity and subsequent dominance of the “master narrative.” For example, one could consider as a “master narrative” the relatively ancient Judeo-Christian concept of the Great Chain of Being, which determines the hierarchical order of beings in the universe (God and angels at the pinnacle, men above women and children, human beings above other animals, etc.). This Western master narrative was sustained throughout the processes of colonization and became a rhetorical tool for obscuring and dominating the competing narratives (and lands, resources, bodies, languages, etc.) of contacted cultures outside of the West.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Michel Foucault is most famous for his influential critical analyses of institutions such as prisons, hospitals, schools, and archives. Even though Foucault himself disliked the term "postmodern" because he considered it vague and imprecise, he is still considered key to postmodern thought because of the influential way Foucault traced power structures. According to Foucault, power is not a thing but a relation, and not simply repressive but productive. Also, power is not something that is exclusively localized in government and the State (which is not a universal essence). Rather, power is exercised throughout the social body. Foucault argued that power operates at the most micro levels of social relations. Power is omnipresent at every level of the social body, and that the exercise of power is strategic and warlike. Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's 18th century prison design, the Panopticon, as a metaphor for the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)
Although he published prolifically from the late 1960s until the end of his life, Jean Baudrillard's best-known work remains Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Nearly as influential in pop culture as it is in theory, Simulacra and Simulation's main argument is that all reality has been replaced with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. The "simulacra" are the signs of culture and media that create the perceived reality. According to Baudrillard, we are so innundated with simulacra that we now live in an infinitely operational "hyperreal" that is very different from the abstract "real" we used to know. That understanding was based on a very specific understanding of the distinction between real and imaginary. Popular films like The Matrix (1997) and television programs like Dollhouse (2009) draw heavily upon Baudrillard's theories of simulation and reality (even though Baudrillard himself has said in interviews that he felt as though his ideas were misinterpreted by the producers of The Matrix).
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
In academic culture, Jacques Derrida is nearly synonymous with the theory of deconstructionism, even though Derrida himself disliked the term. Deconstructionism is closely associated with postmodernism; deconstructionism can be defined simply as challenging the attempt to establish any ultimate or secure meaning in a text. The method by which one "does" deconstruction (which Derrida demonstrates in essays like his "Cogito") usually consist of doggedly pursuing the meaning of a text to the point of undoing (or "deconstructing") the oppositions on which it seems to be founded. The outcome is showing that these foundations unstable or somehow irrational.
Postmodernism and Rhetoric
Contemporary rhetoric and postmodernism are closely linked. If, as rhetorician Malea Powell says, rhetoric is always about power, then a rhetorician must have useful tools for finding where power is and following where power travels in discursive structures. The contexts and cultures of a 21st century world require that these tools also be timely; Derridian deconstruction, Lyotardian identification of master narratives, and Foucaultian interpretation of institutional power structures are all habitually employed by contemporary rhetoricians in the processes of dismantling discursive power structures. Additionally, Baudrillard's ideas of the simulacrum have become particularly useful to rhetoricians studying digital culture.
Certainly the ideas of the four theorists I have discussed in this entry are not the only important theorists of the postmodern; I have chosen to write about Lyotard, Foucault, Baudrillard and Derrida because they seem to be the "postmodern" theorists most favored by rhetoricians that are active in the discipline right now.
The most curious thing about postmodernism is the way it resists definition. Postmodernism tends toward of slippage and multiplicity and thus I will not make any difinitive statement about it here. To do so would not be very postmodern. Or would it be? Ask me some other day.
References & Resources
- Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition.
